Until some fifty years after the death of William Shakespeare, boy actors played women’s roles on the London stage. Alexander Cooke, the protagonist of The Secret Player and its sequels, is an historical actor listed in Shakespeare’s First Folio, the collection of his plays published by two of the members of his company in 1623. In my version, Cooke works her way into stage playing by an indirect route.
Yes, her. Sander Cooke, as she’s known, is born female. A girl disguised as a boy, she primarily plays women’s roles on the London stage. Some of these involve the woman taking on a male disguise. Onstage and off, gender is a constant challenge for Sander.
Critics and biographers will be referred to in these essays, but the ideas are mine from my research and thought about presenting Cooke’s story fictionally.
Introduction
It’s a commonplace to refer to Shakespeare’s themes as universal—and not just to western culture. Theatre companies from all over the world perform his plays in translation.
But besides these universals of heart and thought, many assumption sand conventions of his day do not accord with ours. For example, Elizabethans delighted in spectacles of bear-baiting, where chained, blinded bears were attacked by mastiffs, the dogs often killed by the bear’s protective claws. Throngs attended brutal public executions, which involved hanging, followed by drawing and quartering.
Likewise, many Elizabethan views of gender, education and literacy differed from ours—as did their sense of the public theatre. Actors on the London stage were not the trained Shakespeareans we expect today nor were they particularly respectable; playwrights didn’t always put their names on their works; preachers declaimed against the theatre—and boys played women’s parts. Everyone loved the theatre, from apprentices to aristocrats. Queen Elizabeth, who couldn’t attend public theatres with the rabble, had the performers bring their plays to her in her royal palaces. Twelfth Night and other special celebrations featured daily royal performances.
All-boy companies, such as the Children of St. Paul’s and the Children of the Chapel (originally choirs) were allowed to perform within the city, but adult companies were limited to the suburbs of London, to the north in Shoreditch or Bankside, south of the river Thames.
Hamlet mocks boy actors in the children’s companies as “little eyases,” or fledgling hawks. My focus, however, is on apprentice player boys who personated women on such stages as the Rose, the Curtain, The Theatre, and later the Globe, located in the suburbs—the boys who played Juliet and Rosalind and Lady Macbeth.
Women were forbidden to act onstage both because of the questionable social state of actors, engaged in a profession which involved lying and presumed loose morals. Women were to be dependent and subservient. And silent. If they weren’t to speak their minds in private, they certainly were in no position to speak out and display themselves in a public forum.
Although we know some names of boy players, including Alexander Cooke, the protagonist of The Secret Player, we know more about what others thought of them than about their lives from the inside. We know they were regarded as sexually attractive in their gender ambiguity. We would imagine that they were so to women, but the sermons and writings of the time focus on their appeal to men. Wanton, alluring boys, they are called.
The master-apprentice system in Shakespeare’s theatre was not designed to exploit boys sexually, although in one of Ben Jonson’s plays there’s a joke about boys’ risk as actors. Apparently, however, the company looked after and protected their own. They depended on each other, and the success of the company depended on acting skill. Those women’s parts were demanding enough to earn respect for the boys who played them well.
In my novel, Sander Cooke takes on a boy’s disguise and boy’s name, runs away from her village, and, after many adventures, ends up in London. Maintaining her male persona is her biggest acting challenge. Offstage, cross-dressing was a punishable offense, even labeled as treason. Sander is pretty, and of course does catch the eye of some men. When the poet John Donne feels a spark towards her, he wonders at it: he’s not ordinarily attracted to boys.
Gender ambiguity and cross-dressing were fascinating in Shakespeare’s day as well as ours. The border that seems so firm, male or female, is shown to be anything but absolute. Of course we know that today, but as theatrical spectacle, boy actors drew the audiences in.
Subsequent posts will provide background to the world Alexander Cooke experienced when she arrived in London and was accepted as an apprentice into the theatre company whose resident playwright (and actor) was William Shakespeare.